London’s Cheyne Walk provides a sedate streetscape that bears no witness, preserve some blue English Heritage plaques embedded in several façades, to its daredevil heritage. To the redbrick Georgian and Queen Anne properties and apartment buildings that line this Thames-facet road in Chelsea, all way of inventive iconoclasts due to the fact the third quarter of the 19th century have gravitated. Querulous painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler bunked in this article, as did dandified tastemaker Christopher Gibbs, actor Laurence Olivier, and a few of the Rolling Stones, furthermore Marianne Faithfull.
“All of Chelsea is a fairy tale for me,” says Patrick Mele, a youthful decorator who is dependent in New York City but appears to be straight out of the Cheyne Wander playbook, with a tousled mop of darkish hair foaming above an angular confront that is pure Egon Schiele. “My ideal pal increasing up was English, so I have usually been drawn to that Anglo sensibility. And I made use of to come in this article a decade in the past, when I labored for Ralph Lauren, to operate on the retailers.” So, when Sara Tayeb-Khalifa and her husband, Hussein Khalifa, significant-fived Mele’s zesty decoration of a bed room in their Manhattan condominium, they provided to mail him again across the pond to revamp the Cheyne Wander flat they had owned considering the fact that the early 1990s.
“I had completed it room by home by place, but absolutely nothing matched—plus, I no for a longer period required harmless,” clarifies the classy Tayeb-Khalifa, a previous Phillips executive who is partnering with sustainable-vogue designer Jussara Lee on collections of T-shirts and cushions. “I wished to make it delighted: joyful shades, delighted home.” To that conclude, her conversations with Mele were being peppered with references to Auntie Mame, Skip Havisham, and the ceilings of aged French bistros, stained “a color that reminds you of cigarettes, wine, poor alcoholic beverages, and extra cigarettes,” Tayeb-Khalifa states with a chortle. —Mitchell Owens
When asked what someone unfamiliar with his biography might surmise simply by walking by way of his Melbourne residence, Troye Sivan continues to be sanguine: “I’d hope they’d believe that I’m an unpretentious man, perhaps a bit eccentric, anyone who loves art and layout, an individual devoted to his family—and absolutely the truth that I’m gay,” states the wildly popular 25-year-previous Australian singer-songwriter and actor.
Indeed, if that hypothetical visitor took place to be a persnickety structure snob, they’d absolutely not are unsuccessful to register the array of treasures by the likes of Percival Lafer, Ettore Sottsass, Tobia Scarpa, and Marios Bellini and Botta the cabinetry facts encouraged by Charlotte Perriand and Jean Prouvé and the bespoke, Memphis-flavored appointments of the tub and powder rooms. On a further degree, however, it would also be crystal obvious that this is the household of somebody with the cultivation and self esteem to understand that good style is as substantially about suitability and nuance as it is about vital objects and artworks.
“Troye is an exceptionally savvy collaborator. In our earliest conversations, he talked about materiality, how he required to really feel in his household, about the scent and the seem and the light-weight. It was so significantly much more than just a few quite points he located on Pinterest,” remembers designer David Flack of local firm Flack Studio, Sivan’s husband or wife in the sensitive, advanced reimagining of the singer’s Victorian-period house.
The dwelling in concern is a legitimate architectural gem. Erected in 1869 as a handball courtroom, the developing was converted into a brick manufacturing unit in 1950 and then subsequently reworked into a home in 1970 by renowned Australian architect John Mockridge, a fixture of the neighborhood art-and-style and design scene. The conversion is explained to be the first adaptive reuse task of its kind in the town. “You can picture Mockridge and his good friends sitting all over ingesting whiskey and talking about artwork. I desired to preserve that bohemian spirit and honor the first architecture when developing something that feels like me,” Sivan claims. —Mayer Rus